The Promise of Suspense

Last week I told you about creating suspense by promising things that will go wrong. My favorite scenes in the Star Wars movies grow from one inspired bit of dialog: Han Solo looks around and says, “I got a bad feeling about this.” Actually at least 5 different characters say that in the series but only Han Solo says it more than once.
When Scarlett O’Hara swears s he’ll never be hunger again.  Marley tells scrooge he’ll be visited by 3 ghosts. Or in a romance story when a jilted lover says something like, “If I can’t have her nobody will,” That’s promising bad stuff. In the romance, maybe that guy hides in the bushes until his rival shows up. The bad guy pulls his knife. The good guy looks around, looks right at the bush but doesn’t see the bad guy hidden there. He turns his back to the bad guy… Yep! Milk that moment. That’s the suspense.
But make sure that eventually you show us what happens in front of that bush. You have got to keep every promise you make, and the bigger the promise, the bigger the payoff has to be. A huge promise without the fulfillment isn’t suspense—it’s disappointment. That’s why Frodo can’t simply pull off the ring and toss it. And Rocky can’t knock out Apollo Creed with a lucky punch in the third round.  Every word in your story is a promise of some sort. If you spend a paragraph describing a woman’s fabulous shoes, those shoes better be vital to the story. The cliché is, if you show me a gun on the mantle in chapter 2, somebody better darned well aim that thing at someone before the books’ over.
Stories sometimes fail because the writers don’t make big enough promises, or they don’t fulfill them.
Another side of the promise concept is, let the characters tell readers their plans. That doesn’t mean give away all the secrets. It means show the reader the character’s agenda. Readers know something will go wrong because they know, on some level, that the story is about conflict. In the romance story I made up with the guy hiding in the bushes, that scene would be stronger if earlier we had heard the good guy tell the girl, “I’ll meet you by the bushes at 6 o’clock!” Now we’re not only worried about him getting stabbed, we also get to worry that she’ll see it, or that she might be the next victim.
I’ll share more on mastering suspense next week.